Hello people in the digital dimension. It is the first day of Pride Month, and this year I have an agenda for what this time period is going to represent for me and the wider community.

I am a proudly aroace-spec person. After finding a post on Instagram about it, I read this research study about asexuality and asexual people's thoughts on their acceptance within the LGBTQ community and the wider community as a whole. The overall result of the study concluded that people who identify as asexual have experienced or observed a decline in acceptance from the last 12 months compared to non-asexual LGBTQ people.

I wish I could say this surprised me. But honestly, when I reflect on my identity in the LGBTQ community, a group that usually prides itself as inclusive and welcoming, I have felt everything but.

Like most modern forms of bigotry, people's a-phobia isn't conscious, and it can begin in well-meaning places. I actively engage in LGBTQ nightlife culture around Naarm. These places exist to facilitate an environment where people's sex lives aren't taboo, and thus they are very overtly sexual. I don't mind this, in fact I find active enjoyment in people being able to freely express themselves. But I don't stop being gay the minute I leave a gay bar. My life as a gay person continues to exist regardless of if I'm in an environment where sex is the forefront of conversation and action.

It becomes a problem for me when I enter other LGBTQ-centric conversations or environments and sex or romance continues to be the forefront of action. This was especially important to me when I was younger, as I came out as aro-spec at thirteen and ace-spec at fourteen. Making the LGBTQ community reliant on sex as the forefront of your identity alienates children and young people who haven't gone through puberty. It's common for children, especially now that social media is more accessible to them, to feel inadequate when they haven't developed some sort of understanding of their sexual identity, and end up identifying as asexual until realising that they were, in fact, just a kid who hadn't developed their libido yet.

When we move beyond children or young people, we move to asexual adults, who still don't want sex to be the forefront of their identity. Speaking from my own experience (which doesn't inform the entire reality, but is still apparent within the circles I encounter), the LGBTQ community has accidentally framed asexuality to be this transitional identity where you haven't developed a libido yet or you're not comfortable having sex yet, until you grow into an adult and let go of the label, and the people still hanging onto it are weird somehow. I knew what I was when I was 13/14 and I know who I am now, and yes maybe it has changed but it hasn't gone away, and no one should expect it to.

Non-intersected asexual/aromantic people

The study goes on to look at the opinion of aromantic/asexual people who don't also identity under a different LGBTQ identity. As you would expect, their rate of internal discrimination is higher.

I am a sociological realist first, LGBTQ person second. The LGBTQ label is a made-up word to mean everything about sex and gender that the normals don't consider normal, but if we start making everything normal, then all of a sudden LGBTQ as a word no longer exists, because nothing is there to be demonised by the normals. But heaven forbid I point this out to people. LGBTQ as a label should never have existed because discrimination should never have existed. The LGBTQ community has become this Sneetches-style story where everyone wants so badly to be different, then accepted, then not accepting those who are different, and not differentiating those who are accepted.

Therefore, why is it an argument for how valid asexual or aromantic people are? If LGBTQ people are taboo, then aro/ace people are LGBTQ. There is a very easy line to draw between dudes who fuck dudes and dudes who fuck kids, yes, we all understand this. One is consensual and the other is disgusting. But the line between dudes who fuck dudes and dudes who fuck girls was historically equally as thick, and is only just beginning to fade. But we can still acknowledge that the line is there, that there is still something radical about being gay that sets you apart from the norm, the healthy, the valid. But asexual and/or aromantic people exist on this side of the line, holding an identity that makes them different from the norm we have created, yet somehow a line exists between them and the rest of the LGBTQ community.

Does this study even matter?

It matters on the wider scale (funding for LGBTQ organisations that aid aro/ace people, as explained within the study), but I think it matters on the smaller scales too. Being a non-AMAB gay person is a weird experience which can be talked about in another Pride Month, but being an aroace-spec person who is decently engaged in LGBTQ culture is an experience I cannot politely put in words. It creates a different type of tiptoe-ing to when I explain that as a gay man I don't date women. It's a shuffle where you tell someone that you're aroace-spec but no one knows what that really means, and most people think it means you're opposed to relationships entirely, and very few people are willing or able to learn the limits of aro/ace people's boundaries in relationships, and therefore no one tries. I think it is important now more than ever that aro/ace people are more adequately represented as LGBTQ people and valid within the community. Aro/ace people experience love in a way that is unique and beautiful, just like any member of the LGBTQ community. Why wouldn't you love them equally?

What Pride represents in 2026

Everything in our time is corporate. Rainbows are slapped onto everything you can attach a price tag to. Our existence is a commodity. Now more than I ever I like to remember that pride began as a riot. Is it good that LGBTQ people are accepted in society now more than before? Obviously. But the goal of Pride is not to give equality to queer people, it's to give a voice to the radical. Our queer siblings who forget where they came from are doomed to forget that their rights were never a given. The world wants equality for queer people but only if they give up accountability for discriminating against them in the first place.

Maybe we don't need to be throwing bricks at cops anymore to celebrate Pride. But we need to remember that we started there, and that we still have a long way to go. Everything in the western world is pretty peachy (well, kind of), but the large majority of the world isn't as accepting, and LGBTQ people are still actively in danger for existing. The same way that we celebrate Pride for the people who never could, we need to fight for Pride for the people who cannot yet.

What Pride represents for aro/ace people

I feel like many young people who navigated LGBTQ discourse online in 2020/2021 will know about how weird it was. Without being able to go and connect with the older LGBTQ community in person, it felt like a lot of people discovered their queer identity but had to create a culture for themselves when they had no idea what to build it from. Suddenly LGBTQ violence was not the stirring of violent conversation, it was small micro-aggressions that took priority. Opinions on neo/xenopronouns were more important than opinions on statistics of quality of life. That isn't to say that some issues were more 'real' than others, but it felt as if there was an old LGBTQ culture and history being erased to make way for a new, hostile community whose issues were born and raised in isolation, and many of them died there.

When I reflect on when I came out of COVID isolation and actually entered the world as an out queer person, it was not pronouns or labels that defined me, it was how I looked, or what I said. No one had questions on why I was trans, or why I went by this or that, or how I knew I was gay. The questions were 'will you transition?' or 'how did you discover this label?', or 'what kind of partner are you looking for?'. But being openly aroace meant the questions or judgements I received were more intrinsic to my literal being. It had nothing to do with the life I chose to live, but with the life I had been born to survive.

"Are you sure you'll feel that way forever?"

"How will you ever be happy if you live like that?"

"Why do you have to be so complicated?"

"Are you sure it isn't a medical problem?"

Despite being part of the LGBTQ community, aro/ace people experience a very different kind of discrimination, one reminiscent of the kind of discrimination the wider community used to experience regularly. This Pride, I want to remind people that being aroace is something I deserve to be proud of the same way any other queer person is. When we focus on queer voices fighting for change and equality, aro/ace voices need to be heard too.

Always in your orbit,

andro-venus :)